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Between 1739 and 1742, Britain’s major war effort against Spain was concentrated in the Caribbean. This book sets out to examine the problems involved in operating and administering the overseas naval bases at the heart of this effort. Drawing largely on unpublished archive material, it paints a detailed picture of the organization and development of the yard facilities at Jamaica and English Harbor, as well as examining the problems of manning and supplying the ships stationed there. Making extensive use of ships’ muster books, the author provides for the first time a quantitative assessment of the problems of sickness and desertion facing the commanders in the West Indies. The title of this book is taken from the two most common diseases suffered by the men stationed in the Caribbean.
The “acclaimed naval historian . . . takes the reader through the intricacies of warship design and construction in both French and British navies.” —Historical Novel Society In the series of wars that raged between France and Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, seapower was of absolute vital importance. Not only was each nation’s navy a key to victory, but was a prerequisite for imperial dominance. These ongoing struggles for overseas colonies and commercial dominance required efficient navies which in turn insured the economic strength for the existence of these fleets as instruments of state power. This book, by the distinguished historian Jonathan Dull, look...
Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus trace how the plantation machine developed between 1748 and 1788 and was perfected against a backdrop of almost constant external war and imperial competition.
"The colonial Low Country (the Carolinas, Georgia) and British Caribbean made up an integrated region quite distinct from the Chesapeake, Mid-Atlantic, or New England. Like Maryland and Virginia, the greater Southeast--which formed, as Mulcahy argues, a dynamic center of the British imperial scheme in the New World--relied on staple crops and slave labor. Yet the economic and social ties that bound the Carolinas and the West Indies created quite distinct cultures, black and white alike, giving planters, e.g., a sense of taste and behavior far more tropical and Continental than the ideals that influenced tobacco planters in the Chesapeake. The location and trade patterns of the Carolinas and West Indies encouraged the purchase of slaves from sources and in numbers that ensured far greater persistence of African traditions (and threats of violence) than elsewhere. Mulcahy offers us a short book that explores this early-American/Caribbean region in the manner of our other series titles--explaining the integrity if not unity of the region and what made it so and also comparing it to other economic/cultural regions in the colonial period"--
When Robert J. Rider died in 1961, he left to his descendants a typescript text, tentatively entitled Flashbacks, which would eventually become Reflections on the Battlefield. Broadly autobiographical, this text offers a unique account of its author who fought as an infantryman while also serving as a chaplain, thus exposing himself in peculiar directness to the ambiguities of chaplaincy service on the battlefield. A further particularity is that Rider was in a minority among chaplains, being a Methodist chaplain. In August 1914, Rider, aged twenty-five, was about to begin his third year of training for the ministry of the Wesleyan Methodist church, at Handsworth Theological College in Birmi...
This remarkable work is a comprehensive historiographical and bibliographical survey of the most important scholarly and printed materials about the naval and maritime history of England and Great Britain from the earliest times to 1815. More than 4,000 popular, standard and official histories, important articles in journals and periodicals, anthologies, conference, symposium and seminar papers, guides, documents and doctoral theses are covered so that the emphasis is the broadest possible. But the work is far, far more than a listing. The works are all evaluated, assessed and analysed and then integrated into an historical narrative that makes the book a hugely useful reference work for stu...
In The Seven Years’ War: Global Views, Mark H. Danley, Patrick J. Speelman, and sixteen other contributors reach beyond traditional approaches to illuminate the conflict as world war. An introduction addresses the challenges of discretely defining the war. Chapters examine theaters such as the Carnatic, Bengal, the Philippines, Portugal, Senegal, and the Caribbean. Other chapters treat understudied topics such as the Anglo-Cherokee campaigns, Sweden’s participation, Ottoman neutrality, the Vatican, European perceptions of Cossacks and Kalmyks, the Enlightenment and the war, the choosing of sides in Europe and North America, social and political aspects of French and British military life, operational reconnaissance, and the war’s complex ending in western Germany. A conclusion situates the war as a marker of modernity. Contributors are in order of appearance: Juergen Luh, Armstrong Starkey, Matthew C. Ward, G.J. Bryant, Johannes Burkhardt, Gunnar Aselius, Virginia H. Aksan, Julia Osman, Ewa Anklam, Mrian Fuessel, James Searing, Richard Harding, John Oliphant, Mark H. Danley, Patrick J. Speelman, Nicholas Tracy, and Matt Schumann.
The rapid growth of nineteenth-century English cities produced leafy suburbs, and an occasional feature of these was the development of the estate park of modestly secluded Victorian villas. To preserve their valued amenities, such parks bound the middle-class owners of houses within them by restrictive legal covenants. The documents relating to such parks are often inaccessible, but for three of them in Liverpool, the available records enable their early history to be studied. The first part of this book deals with the legal basis and evolution of the restrictive covenant, a device still of considerable importance in housing development and amenity protection across England. The second part deals individually with the three Liverpool parks, the social reasons for their foundation and growth, and the problems that beset the entrepreneurs who established them in the mid-nineteenth century (and often then lived in them) during the early years of the parks’ existence. After more than a hundred years, all three of the parks studied continue not only as highly favored residential areas, but also as exemplars of the success of the deployment of the restrictive covenant.
While the Victorian period marked a significant phase in the development of the ancient cathedral city of Chester, references to Victorian Chester have been notable for their absence from recent scholarship. Based on extensive local research, this volume of essays breaks new ground by examining some important aspects of the social history of Chester between 1830 and 1900. By combining detailed case studies of specific themes with wider discussion, these essays explore the ways in which Cestrian society reacted to the changing circumstances of the Victorian period and analyse local perceptions of, and responses to, a range of contemporary social problems. As such, this original study not only illuminates the social and cultural history of the period, but also illustrates both the complexity and diversity of Victorian cities. It includes the most comprehensive bibliography of Victorian Chester to date.
The diary of the 17th Earl of Derby, once thought to have been lost, provides a detailed and important account of the last months of the First World War as seen through the eyes of the British Ambassador in Paris. Derby was in many ways an unlikely choice as ambassador. He was not a diplomat and could not, on his arrival, speak French. His appointment owed much to Lloyd George’s determination to remove him from his previous post as Secretary of State for War. But, after a somewhat uncertain start, he proved to be a very successful ambassador upon whom successive Foreign Secretaries, Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon, relied heavily for their appreciation of the situation on the other side of ...